The structure and the call is in place now. But still, it could be tiresome sometimes to remember the path to the man pages, especially if one were to declare multiple locations.

To add the ~/ownman location to the locations man is looking at by default, the configuration file needs to be edited. On Ubuntu this file is: /etc/manpath.config (for Red Hat and Red Hat derivatives, like CentOS and Fedora, the configuration file for man is /etc/man.config)

# need sudo rights for this, as the owner of the file is root
sudo vi /etc/manpath.config

Edit the file by adding a new entry in the MANDATORY_MANPATH section.

MANDATORY_MANPATH ~/ownman

If there is a need to specify different man pages path for different command paths, another edit needs to be made, further down in the file. A new entry for MANPATH_MAP